welcome back to the big picture i'm tom hartman coming up in this half hour in a moment we'll be taking your calls in our new york take my take a live segment so if you have something to say around give us a call right now at two zero two nine zero four twenty one thirty four and in tonight's daily take while america's housing crisis continues to linger like a bad cold lawmakers in washington are doing very little to help the nation's

devastated homeowners what will it take for lawmakers to realize that helping homeowners means helping the entire economy to. come to your take my take live our phone lines are now open so if you want to share an opinion make a comment ask a question live on the air any topic you want it's an open mike time the show we call it or anything goes give us a call it two or two and i know for twenty one thirty four so our first caller the night jim in philadelphia eight jim what's on your mind and i. hope. ok well today on our radio show we had a number of really interesting topics the first was we had reverend bill keller on

talking about how he was suggesting that people write in jesus as their as their as their vote don't don't vote for obama or romney is right in jesus and so i was asking ok you know who would jesus vote for and you know who represents those values and bill is a hardcore right wing fundamentalist so it was really interesting to get that now said people talking about big bird kevin in manhattan is on the line right now kevin thanks for calling two zero two nine zero four twenty one thirty four what's on your mind. i just want to make a comment about. the p.b.s. last romney talking about flashing totally slashing p.b.s. five spend an hour a lot for a lot of people that's their only form. higher marks you now and dance and music and when i was growing up those were my nature programs

a lot of people do not ask cable t.v. i have cable t.v. obviously i'm watching you and i think it's a tragedy that this man can actually sit back and you now discourage people from seeing the great performances you know such as nature programs the arts b c news. sherlock holmes all the great mysteries all the quality programming that. i'm with you have al and i appreciate your perspective and your and your call i think he said it well and you know in the u.k. the government funds the taxpayers fund it's two dollars a year i mean our contribution of p.b.s. here in the iss is around a dollar a year per person but they fund the b.b.c. it's got all kinds of educational programs a lot of fascinating stuff in france. they have ever national programs that most

countries do this. ours is get a little weird it seems canon in upper marlboro maryland hey can i thank you for calling what's on your mind tonight. you know. when i'm looking at a grief. come together and you know pull. up in the what is it going to take in this country. saying put it in the village look it can it's one of the things that there's actually two differences between our situation and that agrees the first is that it's just a heck of a lot worse in greece right now and when it was as bad i mean looking greek unemployment is where we were in one hundred thirty two and in one hundred thirty two you had the biggest occupation movement of the twentieth century here in north america in the united states you had people the bonus army they were literally camped from the lawn of the white. house all the way down to the potomac river you know tens of thousands of people and president hoover had douglas macarthur you

know come in with tanks and on horseback and try to burn him out. unsuccessfully so there was this enormous pressure that was happening people were in the streets because it was so bad and i think frankly if obama hadn't done his stimulus and if we were still losing seven hundred thousand jobs a month like we were when bush left office and you know the first month or so the obama administration before the before the obama policies really kicked in that we would be in the streets right now like greece's and like we were in one thousand nine hundred two so one is not that bad here in two in greece and in most of europe what you find is that you know more than half in a very small country to country in germany i believe it's well over eighty percent logs in and even countries over ninety percent of the workforce is unionized and the unions serve as a way of pulling people together to try to get out on the streets and speak out and here in the united states ronald reagan kicked off that war on working people and in it when when he went after patco and so that was the end of that kind of thing i

appreciate the call thank you very much karen in seattle hey karen what's on your mind today hi i was just talking to your producer that was there for just about union. my husband belong to the biggest in the world and he was the worst thing we did not go after reagan when he went after the air traffic controllers i agree and i'm afraid that it's going to get so bad like that people get together. well you know about you know i i think that we can do it with or without unions in again and good looking back in one nine hundred thirty two in the united states it wasn't until nine hundred thirty the four thirty five as i recall that the wagner act was passed the national labor relations act that. legalized unions and gave government power to to to unionize people and and so in thirty two when you had the bonus army

camp and you had people all across america demanding change which led to the election of the landslide election franklin roosevelt election great there were not that many union members so so in areas to convey their time and you know we feel in the seattle area really even a nuke is a very unionized town but we've feel that people are just regular people are going union because they're mad at our health care our good health care and are good benefit and it's regular people my own family get mad that we have such good benefits and you know you get and they will but everybody union i've been we cannot afford it they would still have a care and i totally appreciate what you're saying it's very well said and let's have a race to the top and what the conservatives have successfully done is they've been worker against worker by saying hey you know you got this lousy wal-mart type job or staples type job you know you have no benefits but that person over there they're in a union and they've got all these benefits you should feel jealous of them which is

a horrible way to you know do any i mean it's just this is anti-american is destructive of american christians winnipeg canada a chris thanks for calling what's on your mind tonight. hi tom i was just calling i want to ask you both well i read your book an equal protection not a great book thank you and i just wanted to ask you what your take is on the whole corporate personhood as it applies to. people like you i'm sure you've heard both the free men movement or the corporate citizen what do they call it is a sovereign citizen which is really seems like kind of an oxymoron anyway because you're either a sovereign citizen and you can't really be both i was just wondering how you felt about the possibility that corporate personhood has actually worked into the capitalized name and the social security and the whole bankruptcy laws of thirty three or thirty four something in the states can you comment on i think that the

concept of corporate personhood the corporations are people and the money is speech and the corporations have rights of free speech and therefore those rights of free speech extend to political speech is one of the most toxic things that's going on here in the united states chris and i i really appreciate your bringing up this topic as to the sovereign citizen movement. i really think that's completely disconnected from that that's a group of people who in a way are trying to take us back to before the constitution being ratified seventeen nine hundred seventeen eighty nine and putting us back into the articles of confederation which is what we were operating at before that as a nation and with powerful states and weak federal government and we're not going to go back i mean they tried when there was a really serious attempt to basically roll back the federal constitution in the. late eighteenth fifty's early sixty's and we called it the civil war ultimately i

mean that led us right to the civil war so i think those are very very very different things very in delaware county pennsylvania a very welcome to the program thanks for calling and thank you it doesn't get to. my comment is that thank you for somebody got my call if it's gone the first is not going to we if you read the post we're going to start is going to start with the total start if you get bombarded. even on the uk it's on going to log all shines all china and don't just talk a little bit of the stock i don't know you're going to what you think well you're right i think that there is a possibility of a world war one scenario and very i appreciate your calling in making that point in world war one when archduke ferdinand was assassinated nobody could nobody imagined that the world would be plunged into war as a result of that but. country a had a treaty with country b. that said if they were attacked and they were attacked and it just kind of there was this domino effect by the time we got to the world nobody could actually i mean

to this day people can explain why we had world war one so i think you're absolutely right that there's a very real possibility that if we let romney go if romney became president he were to go off on this oh let's attack iran let's attack this let's say that it could lead to a world war and the other thing that gives me pause is this whole concept that strauss and how talked about we did a conversation is a great minds conversation with neal how the co-author of the fourth turning which is a book about how there's these four generations that just continuously cycle through western civilization about every eighty years each generation is about twenty years and one generation experiences war and a depression and out of that comes their children then has a really good result of growing up in that experience they become the quiet builders and then that generation gives birth to a question to a generation that questions authority and then that jenna and then that generation gives birth to and by the way is on spiritual search and then that generation's children they say you know spiritual search didn't get you anywhere why should i do

that i'm just going to make money and then that generation that that third generation is making money or fourth generation really is making money on crack. because the economy you go into a depression and you get a world war so i think the one big dangerous outcome of what you just identified is that we're now eighty years since the last time that happened which was the great depression of world war two eighty years before that was the great depression the eight hundred fifty six and and the civil war eighty years before that was the great depression of the seventeen sixty's late seventy's sixty's early seventy's seventies and the american revolution eighty years before that there was another one so you can you can look at this and say it concerns me and you know that's it for your take my take it live thank you for all your calls if we didn't get your call tonight give us a shout next week. after the break as many european nations continue to struggle at the hands of austerity based economic policies iceland and ireland are managing to stay afloat and even prosper what do they know that other nations dollars and

shouldn't our lawmakers in washington be listening. the war. in. iraq.

more news today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. china operations are the day.

in news around the world the united nations is calling for a new social safety net for the word world's poor un experts warned that most people around the world do not have adequate social protection from things like illness disability unemployment and high food costs so the u.n. is proposing a twenty billion dollars global social safety net to help people living in the world's forty eight poorest nations developing nations are being asked to

contribute two thirds to the cost of the social welfare program while rich nations are asked to foot the remainder of the bill the un's special report tourer food explained that this is a good investment for the world saying acting preventative lee is much less expensive than intervention on an ad hoc basis because eight times more to act in famine by having safety nets in place it will not be so necessary to intervene at an emergency stage here in the united states we've forgotten this lesson was while our own social safety nets are under unprecedented assault by billionaires like mitt romney and iran followers like his running mate ron paul ryan we need to understand that access to food when you're hungry access to a job when you're poor access to shelter when you're cold and access to health care when you're sick or not watch your ease that the well off should grant to the poor among us these are basic human rights.

crazy alert to having to hold for better and for worse over a large zoom through. in the strange and largely unheard unheard of world of life care rain there is no better team than ty. sto mit ten and christina hop pena and they proved it over the weekend the finnish couple won the north american wife carrying championship in maine on saturday beating out couples from across america and canada so what exactly is life to carry you might ask well basically what it sounds like the husband carries the wife on his back is the perisher versus a challenging and grueling course of mud logs sand hills and more the couple that

completes the course in the fastest amount of time wins for their victory of midterm and happened in one five hundred thirty dollars and happens weight in beer interestingly enough during the wife carrying championship there was a simultaneous event going on a couple towns away in north america and dragging your husband off the couch championship. it's the good the bad and the very very cruel and show us silly ugly they're good obama for america president obama's campaign has released a new ad poking fun at mitt romney's debate comments last week that he would cut funding to p.b.s. big bird take a look. in this country primitives gluttons of

greed and the people who told over them one man has the guts to speak his day big bird big bird big bird gets me a period big yellow a menace to our economy mitt romney don't see it's not street you have to worry about it's system the street i'm going to stop the subsidy to p.b.s. mitt romney taking on ok to be no matter where. a politician in america is ready and. willing to take on the most important and pressing issues of our time the greed and corruption is taking over sesame street watch out cookie monster miss coming for you next with your cookies are from seven eleven. the bad corrections corporation of america if you want to understand why prison privatization is so bad look no farther than the lake erie correctional facility in ohio america's first privately owned state prison according to a recent audit of the facility the prison has no emergency fire plan prison cells

are rarely clean prisoners are forced to sleep on the floor medical treatment is a joke and the quality the food served to the prisoners is sub par at best basically c.c.a. is denying these prisoners who are by the way human beings basic human rights this is because with private prison companies like c.c.a. the only thing that matters is profit and the bottom line the fact that prisoners have to live in squalor paranoid doesn't mean a whole lot. and the very very ugly charlie fuk wa wa is a republican running for the arkansas state legislature and let's just start by saying he has some very disturbing views first foot while believes that all muslims should be expelled from the united states hand he thinks this sentiment is shared by most americans but that's nothing compared to his view on unruly children in his book released earlier this year writes that

a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents the death penalty is not something to be taken lightly yeah you heard that right the death penalty for unruly kids i think this comment really speaks for itself and it's feehery. ask any economist and they'll tell you that the housing crisis is still very real and very much with you it is still one of the major headwinds for our economic recovery yet in the last presidential debate crickets virtually no attention paid

to this crisis and the millions of americans who are on the verge of losing their homes. well because both candidates know the one best solution of the mortgage crisis is to make the banks take a hit and as anyone who's familiar with post citizens united money pours out of the sky from the big corporations in the billionaires politics knows if you're in favor of a policy that's going to hit wall street it's got a lot of the money and you want to be elected to political office then you better keep your mouth shut about and that's exactly what both men did but in ireland they're not afraid of the banks toure's this year the irish government is expected to pass a law that will force the banks to write down principle on their home loans which will also substantially lower monthly mortgage payments for struggling homeowners of all the nations hit by the global housing crisis not a single one has taken bold steps to help homeowners at the expense of the banks

toure's until now ireland is trying to change that here's what they're doing they're going to change their banks of bankruptcy laws to make it easier for struggling homeowners to walk away from an underwater home mortgage and when a homeowner declares bankruptcy this way bank gets nothing so faced with the threat of individual bankruptcies and getting nothing. the banks will suddenly have a lot of incentive to lower the principal owed and also thus reduce the monthly mortgage payments for homeowners down to a level were people can actually afford to stay in their homes that way irish people can stay in their homes and the banks will least get something as ireland's justice minister said this legislation gives homeowners hope for the future iceland has taken similar measures since the two thousand and eight meltdown after taking control of their banks the icelandic government has forgiven loans belonging to

more than a quarter of the population and today the result the icelandic economy is expected to grow two point four percent this year compared to the rest of europe growing at only point two percent as in zero point two iceland two point four proof is out there helping homeowners instead of helping banks toure's is actually good for the economy so let's talk about the united states number two thousand and eight we were told by bush and treasury secretary hank paulson everything is going to collapse unless we wrote a big fat no strings attached bailout check for wall street that we had to bail out wall street so that wall street could then in turn turn around and bail out main street they actually did it twice bailed out wall street and we now know that didn't work out too well for anyone except the wall street bankers all street took their bailout money the banks paid each other massive bonuses they

started gambling in the market again and the homeowners were left out of the equation when the obama administration pushed through legislation the democrats in congress pushed legislation to give the states money to help their citizens write down the principal on their mortgages yes this legislation actually passed and was signed by the president virtually all of the republican controlled states took that money. and used to pay for tax cuts for rich people average homeowners and most of the states saw another so when democrats proposed legislation to stop that prop practice and actually force them to use that money to really help all mothers the republicans blocked it in both the house and the senate because helping out of homeowners might have had a political benefit to president obama and we can't have it. so here we are today wall street is doing better than ever and main street is still drowning in foreclosures problem is we didn't do it iceland and what ireland is about to do

and that's helped the homeowners in fact that's exactly what franklin roosevelt did in one nine hundred thirty three to deal with a very similar housing crash to the one we're dealing with today during the housing bubble in the one nine hundred twenty s. banks handed out a bunch of three and five year mortgages to americans who were riding high on the bubble of the roaring twenty's but after the housing market collapsed forcing the nation into a great depression in the early thirty's those three and five year mortgages suddenly came due and homeowners could no longer afford them and just like today the banks were unwilling to write new mortgages so also just like today foreclosures began skyrocketing across our nation that's when president roosevelt stepped in and created the home owner's loan corporation b h o l c as it was called was given the power to issue new loans to homeowners who are on the verge of foreclosure they took the existing three and five year mortgages radically lowered

the monthly payments by turning them into fifteen year mortgages it's a program only issued new loans for about three years between one thousand thirty three and one hundred thirty six before effectively being shut down but that was all it took to stop the housing crisis back then just three years today we're five years out from the housing bubble bursting and no one in washington seems to have a damned clue about how to help homeowners. but history and examples of ireland and iceland tell us exactly what we needed. we know how to do this we didn't hear before the thirty's but it means in all cases denying the banks tears a few years a billion dollar bonuses. you know frankly wall street's gotten enough favors over the last four years american homeowners need help now. and that's the way it is tonight tuesday october ninth two thousand and twelve for more information on the stories we covered visit our website to tom hartman dot com free speech dot org and

r t dot com and if you missed any of the night's show you can now watch it in hulu at hulu dot com slash the big picture also check out our two you tube channels there are links to tom harkin dot com also target dot com check out all the different ways you can send us your feedback and don't forget them ocracy begins with you get out there get active tag your it so next week.

wealthy british soil the sun it's time to run the. markets why not. find out what's really happening to the global economy with mike stronger for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune in to come as a report on. the so.